Melania’s Outfits Aren’t a Secret Code and I’m Mad It Needs to Be Said
WATCH: Viral Video Shows 16-Year-Old Mexican Male Illegally Crossing U.S. Border, It Doesn’t End Well For Him
December 7, 2019
Pat Sajak is a National Treasure, and Here’s Proof.
December 7, 2019The impeachment clown show becomes more transparent every day, and recent data show a continuation of excellent economic trends during Trump’s presidency. No wonder the mainstream media is stooping this low: They haven’t got a choice.
Melania Trump’s fashion choices is evidently the new thing that we’re all meant to be losing our sh*t over, because as it turns out a gorgeous, sleek jacket draped over the FLOTUS’s shoulders like a cozy blanket actually “exudes cold, dismissive aloofness.”
“The Spirit of America” is shining in the @WhiteHouse! I am delighted to share this beautiful exhibit of patriotism for all to see, and excited for everyone to experience the beauty of the #Christmas season! pic.twitter.com/qGxxl9qBrd
— Melania Trump 45 Archived (@FLOTUS45) December 2, 2019
. . . Riiiiiight. It’s what WaPo writer Robin Givhan dubbed a “discomforting affectation taken to a ludicrous extreme.” Not a beautiful, elegant outfit charming enough to fit in but simple enough to make the decor stand out as the real star. Obviously. If you didn’t get that, you’re probably a white supremacist or something. I’m actually genuinely surprised there were no accusations of white power symbolism in the outfit’s color. Because that’s where we’re at.
Giyhan isn’t the only one at WaPo fretting over conspiracy theories relating to the former model’s fashion choices: Monica Hesse wrote a piece in anticipation of CNN reporter Kate Bennett’s upcoming biography Free, Melania that makes me more concerned for Hesse personally than Melania, the Trump administration, or America as a whole.
First, a note on the book. It’s described by Hesse as follows:
Because FLOTUS didn’t formally participate in this book, much of the content is a write-around — the journalistic term for relying on other people’s accounts when your subject won’t talk. And some of it is speculation: the particular blend of body-language analysis, clothing-choice analysis, telepathy and tea-leaves reading that goes into so many discussions about Melania Trump.
That’s a lot of words to say the book is worthless.
Back to the article, which is titled, “Is Melania Trump sending coded messages, or are we just talking to ourselves?”. I could’ve saved the author a lot of time by saying, “It’s the latter,” but regrettably I didn’t have a chance and now I have to read it. That’s how I know that some people actually believe the infamous “I really don’t care, do u?” jacket that Melania Trump wore to visit children in border facilities was directed not at the detained children, not at the press, but at her stepdaughter somehow.
“Ivanka is the Zara fan, Bennett argues, and the jacket was Melania’s way of taunting her for trying to take credit for pushing her dad to end family separation.”
That’s the caliber of hard-hitting reporting we’re getting from CNN and Washington Post in 2019, folks. We’re still talking about a jacket like, 8 billion years after it was worn. SO MUCH has happened since then. Why are we still on this?
Is there symbolism in everything Melania Trump does, or not? Is Melania Trump playing five-dimensional chess against the rest of her checkers-playing family, or not? Will we ever know? Does it even matter? Does your pointed commentary about the administration’s immigration policy matter if, to understand you’ve commented at all, the American public must intimately know the shopping habits of your grown stepdaughter?
Here’s a non-rhetorical question: Was there a point in writing this piece at all? That’s a big fat N O.
Truly, which is the more unsettling interpretation of Melania Trump? That all of the odd stuff she’s done has been intentional, but she’s bizarrely choosing to communicate in fashion code, rather than to communicate using any one of the five human languages she speaks? Or that she has no plan at all — that she wakes up and throws on pussy bows and sloganed jackets, and nobody surrounding her thinks to say, Hmm? That the rest of the country is merrily rolling toward pandemonium, and meanwhile she’s again planning her holiday decorations six months in advance?
I don’t purport to know any more about the First Lady than any of you, but if I had to guess, I’d say she and her husband probably get a kick out of melting the mainstream medias’ brains. I love that the possibility that maybe they’re just pushing buttons never seemed to occur to Hesse. It’s not like Trump has spent the last three years inviting the media to stir up a storm over inconsequential tweets while he quietly pushes through legislation on the side.
I would like Melania Trump to mean something. I would like for her to mean something in the way that we would all like any of this chaotic era to mean anything, because the alternative is that we’re just living in chaos, in a country led by chaotic people.
I’m sorry, does being the FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED FREAKING STATES not mean enough to you? I think Melania means a whole lot, by virtue of her position and because she’s managed to be a famous model and the wife of the President while still maintaining a level of anonymity that I find awe-inspiring and respectable. Really, this era isn’t so chaotic if you’re able to accept people’s right to privacy and drop the blindfold of partisan-fueled delusion.
In conclusion, Melania Trump is better than everyone writing these ridiculous “stories” and they need to get over it.
